"The OIG team found three problems that led to this failure, all of which stem from the lack of adherence to sound project management and systems development principles. First, CA's [Consular Affairs] Office of Consular Systems and Technology (CST) [PDF] implemented a system programming change without performing adequate testing. Second, CST changed contract task orders without notifying the Office of Acquisition Management (AQM). Third, CST management failed to adequately discuss the changes with all stakeholders and thus did not fully understand how overseas consular officers administer the DV [Diversity Visa] program."

Rather than try to summarize the OIG report, I think the following sections from the report explain the reasons for the screw-up very well.

"CST management decided [For reasons unfortunately not made clear in the OIG report - ed.] in November 2010 not to use the commercial off-the-shelf statistics analysis program that it had used successfully for random rank-ordering in numerous previous years. Instead, CST management asked one of its contractors to develop a program. This new computer program had a coding error that produced a nonrandom rank ordering and thus failed to meet INA [Immigration and Nationality Act] requirements. The program not only selected 98 percent of the applicants from the first two dates of the allowed submission dates, it also selected multiple individuals from the same families."

Now comes the first good part of the OIG report:

"According to CST management and the contractor staff who developed the new DV computer program, testing scenarios were limited to validating that all geographic regions were assigned the correct numerical limitation and that the total number of selectees to be drawn was accurate. In addition, the development, testing, and production implementation of the program were done exclusively by one contracting company that, due to poor planning and failure to consult with all DV stakeholders, did not have adequate information to create a complete test plan for the computer program. Key stakeholders such as CST's independent validation and verification team, the Visa Office, and the contractor that operated and managed the legacy computer program were not involved in planning and implementing the new computer program."

The pitiful project risk mismanagement only gets better, for as:

"... the new contractor was developing the new program, the incumbent contractor tasked with operating and maintaining the legacy selection program was unaware of the new development effort and was preparing to run the old program. CST did not notify the incumbent contractor until it was time to run the selection process. Thus there was no opportunity for the two contracting companies to share information and plan the implementation."

The OIG made four recommendations in the report that can be basically summed up as, "Will you please follow some basic Project Management and Software Development 101?"

In addition, the OIG also noted in the report that the CST manager "left his position" in early October.

The OIG report doesn't state whether this year's Diversity Visa lottery is using the original, perfectly fine COTS random statistics analysis program or the "new one". If the new one is not being used, it would be nice to know just how many taxpayers' dollars were wasted on the effort.